


Two Corpses We Were. Two Corpses We Saw.

by tameimpala



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Emotional Hurt, Flashback, Gen, Post-Hell Dean Winchester, Pre-Series, Salt And Burn, Season/Series 04, Traumatized Sam Winchester, Wordcount: 1.000-5.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-18
Updated: 2018-03-18
Packaged: 2019-04-04 08:57:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14016771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tameimpala/pseuds/tameimpala
Summary: “I was going to get you out Dean. Me.”The words burned in his throat. He had needed to be the one to free his brother whilst he had been whole and untinged by hell, and perhaps more importantly, whilst Sam had been whole. Maybe it would have been a small victory in the long run, maybe it wouldn’t have changed things, but he’d been in this life long enough to know that small victories stack up.Sam takes part in his first grave exhumation since he buried his own brother 7 months ago, only for it to unleash past and present trauma.Set in early Season 04 with a Pre-series Flashback





	Two Corpses We Were. Two Corpses We Saw.

* * * 

#  ________________

  


  


Between them, Sam had no earthly clue just how many bodies they had exhumed. However, he was pretty sure that Dean had probably seen a hell of a lot more than him, especially when he was younger.

  


Sam still remembers Dean waking up in a blind panic, eyes wide in the dark and dank motel room, after coming back to their temporary abode alongside their father- smelling of lighter fuel and soil. 

Sam, ever the curious kid, would always ask what Dean had seen. Back then his older brother had been the smooth invincible Dean Winchester, he could bullseye 6 cans without even drawing a breath, he could sweet talk his way out of any bind they found themselves in, he could find money for food when all signs pointed to starvation… Sam couldn’t imagine what could scare his tough-as-nails brother enough to make him bolt awake like he did. 

He wanted to know.

 _“It was nothing Sammy,”_ Dean always muttered sleepily after he’d let the shock of the dream wash over him. _“Can’t even remember what it was- go back to sleep.”_

Sam exhumed his first body when he turned thirteen, much to his brother’s dismay. 

_“Go back to the car Sammy you don’t have to see this,”_ Dean’s hand pushed him gently backwards but their father gripped his shoulder, preventing him from leaving.

 _“No, he does. He has to see it Dean, he’s here to learn.”_ John Winchester told him and held out a strip of matches to his youngest son he’d swiped from their motel, The Kingfisher Inn. Sam always remembered that name, he could still see the pond green lettering on the thin packaging in his mind’s eye.

Their father climbed into the grave that both Sam and his brother had dug, holding a gallon of lighter fuel in one hand and a crowbar in the other. With practised ease he levered the coffin open with a splintering crack of sealed rotting wood and threw the lid open. 

Thank God her eyes were gone, thought Sam at the time. He didn’t think he could have set her body alight if her eyes had been looking up at him, watching him. 

Of course he couldn’t have just burnt a dusty old set of bones. No, Sam’s first pyrotechnic gig had to be on a body buried only 3 months prior. Decay had certainly set in, the shrunken corpse below him wore ragged clothes that thankfully covered most of its sunken skin. However, the same couldn’t be said about her face and the skeletal hands that lay over her chest. The darkened flesh now only barely covered the skull and had pulled back to reveal yellowing teeth stuck in a perpetual grin. 

Sam had shuddered so much he could feel his own bones rattling beneath his skin. 6 feet deep in the pit they’d spent 20 minutes digging, his father simply dosed the body in the accelerant whilst wearing a blank empty expression on his face. 

For the first time Sam understood the mask John wore, it was for his own self-preservation. The only way you could live through nightmares was if you stopped yourself from processing it, maybe even become a nightmare yourself. 

  


_“You do your job, you get outta there.”_

  


Done. Onto the next one. Rinse and Repeat.

Never dwell on it. 

But that was Sam’s problem, text-book over thinker. His brother and father, their masks fitted well and only slipped occasionally. Sam’s never fit in the first place.

He’d set that woman alight and stared so deeply into the flames that the rancid smoke marked his face made his eyes stream with water. Dean dragged him away and back to the safety of the car in silence. No one said a word on the journey back to The Kingfisher Inn _(matchbook, green letters)_ but Dean stayed in the back of the Impala with his brother. Sam had appreciated that and offered him a strained smile when he caught Dean looking at him worriedly. His father also kept on throwing him small glances through the rear-view mirror. It was like they were waiting for a reaction to his first corpse-burning, any at all. Sometimes the collective moods of them all depended on the youngest member. 

Sammy Winchester, forever the tone setter of their small family. 

The nightmares came for him that night, it wasn’t the first time and certainly wasn’t the last time they had interrupted his sleep. Just as the eyeless corpse reached for him he bolted upright and started to pant as though he’d just ran a marathon, the oversized t-shirt he slept in clinging to his sweat soaked skin.

  


A different hand lay on his shoulder, not a lifeless rotten one but the soft comforting hand of his brother.

  


_“Sammy, it’s okay. Just go back to sleep. You’ll forget it soon.”_

  


* * * * * * *

  


Now the same hand hit him playfully on the back and Sam turned to see Dean push a shovel into his arms.

  


“You back on the planet yet?” He asked, a smirk on his face but concern in his eyes. 

_No, but thank god you are,_ he almost replied. But didn’t. 

Sam did not want to dig up this corpse at all, bile clawed at his throat as he looked down at the earth beneath him. He hadn’t exhumed a body in around 7 months, not since he’d been the one to lower a pine box containing his dead brother into the ground. 

A familiar shiver ran down his spine that made him feel like his body was centuries old and yet simultaneously that same damaged teenager again. 

“How did you do it Dean?” Sam asked hoarsely, still staring down at the rusty shovel in his hands.

“Do what?” Replied the older man as he plunged his own shovel into the dirt. The iron spade hit the earth with a metallic thud, but it barely sunk deep enough to make a significant dent.

How could hands claw their way out if metal took so long?

Sam swayed where he stood as flashes of himself maddeningly digging soil with the same shovel Dean now held ran through his head… The ice cold feel of the iron handle of the spade, the damp smell clinging to his body and staining his clothes, a pine box waiting behind him, ready to be plunged into the ground and covered up, ready to be broken back into, to save his brother…

But he never did. And yet Dean was standing next to him again, taking the shovel back from him. 

  


Sam hadn’t been digging Dean’s grave, he realised now, he’d been digging his own.

  


“You crawled out.” Said Sam hoarsely, regaining his footing along with his grasp on reality. He peeled his eyes away from the ground to look at Dean, who was looking back at him with a confused expression on his face. “You crawled out of your _grave_ Dean.”

The older man’s eyes softened and he sighed heavily. “Sammy…” He said as he tossed Sam’s shovel away from them, “You don’t have to do this.”

“The digging or…” Sam's question trailed off on it's own accord. What was he really asking? To dig up the dead or dig up their past? 

Then again, in Sam and Dean Winchester lives, they seemed to be one and the same.

“Either. Or both.” Supplied Dean, offering an understanding smile. Offering him a way out. 

But Sam decided to dig in his own patented way, even though he was shovel-less. Turns out the past doesn’t need one. 

“Did it hurt?” Asked Sam as Dean returned to his shovel, which stood upright in the ground waiting for him to resume his task, to dig up the grave they had come here to exhume.

Dean froze for a second, pondering the question, then grasped the handle of the heavy spade and dug. After a while he’d begun to work up a rhythm and seemed focused on the job. But Sam knew he’d answer eventually, because Dean was pliable when he was working. Things slipped off his tongue much easier when he was occupied.

“It wasn’t fun.” Came Dean’s belated reply, shaking Sam from his thoughts, “Took a few hits to splinter the wood. Dirt rained down on me before I ran out of oxygen, so there’s that.”

“I made it shallow.” Said Sam, thinking back to those woods, back to the digging and the pine box.

Dean laughed as he swung dirt into the pile he’d created next to the hole he was sinking into. 

It may have been shallow, but it had felt like miles.

“Thanks Sammy.” He puffed, sweat beginning to break on his brow, “I’m glad you didn’t go for the deluxe polished mahogany coffin with fancy padded lining. A pauper’s grave is so much easier to break out off. It’s a shame poor Sylvia here didn’t have that luxury.”

Dean gestured to the grave stone behind him and muttered, “And nobody came to save her.”

Sam suddenly remembered the reason they were here. Sylvia O’Connell, knocked out and buried alive by her father 25 years ago. She had returned from the dead to pick off what was left of her living family thanks to the unlucky discovery of a necklace. It had been the only possession of hers that her father had kept.

It was a sad story, but then again their whole lives consisted of them, both on and off the job. The stories he gleaned from cases impacted him at the time, but they soon faded from his memory, each one a small dying star. Clear trivial images stayed with him though, snapshots he forgot about until something unsettled the stack. Images like the first body he ever exhumed, like the Kingfisher Inn matches he’d used to set it alight.

He had a Zippo lighter in his pocket today. He wondered whether Dean would offer to burn this corpse for him too. 

  


Nobody shielded him like his older brother, he thought to himself. Then to his dismay, frustration at his failure to return Dean’s protection surged through Sam’s entire body, like it so often had in the months that he’d been gone.

“I was going to get you out Dean. Me.” The words burned in his throat. He had needed to be the one to free his brother whilst he had been whole and untinged by hell, and perhaps more importantly, whilst _Sam_ had been whole. Maybe it would have been a small victory in the long run, maybe it wouldn’t have changed things, but he’d been in this life long enough to know that small victories stack up.

“I know you were.” Said Dean breathlessly, still digging steadily and making good progress, “But none of it was on you Sam.” 

The younger man disagreed wholeheartedly on that. 

“This one was.” Replied Sam. He’d told Dean similar words to that effect one and a half years ago, that he had to save his ass for a change. It dawned on the hunter that he’d been standing at the edge of another cemetery when he found out that his brother was going to die. 

Graveyards seemed to attract showdowns in his experience, for all the time he’d spent in them, every time felt like a confrontation. 

Maybe it felt like that to other (normal) people too, a confrontation of their own mortality. But Sam had never truly feared his own death. After the pain that he was no stranger to had faded away, he’d felt nothing but comfort as he’d died in Cold Oak. Jake had gutted him quickly and professionally, straight though his spinal cord, and his brother had held him as darkness began to shroud him. 

He supposed he was lucky to be killed by a human and not ferocious hellhounds intent on tearing him a part like Dean had the misfortune of enduring, or even being knowingly buried alive by his own father like Sylvia O’Connor had. But then again, who’s to say John Winchester hadn’t considered that or some other unorthodox method of getting rid of his demonically infected son.

Sam tried to dispel these disturbing thoughts by watching his brother as he continued to dig up Sylvia’s grave. The younger hunter found himself wondering if Dean was going to reassure Sam further. He didn’t. Instead he just continued to sink further and further into the ground until only the top of his head was visible and the sound of his shovel hitting wood reverberated in the cool autumn air.

“We’ve hit gold.” Called Dean from the freshly dug pit.

As if moving on their own accord, Sam’s legs decided to walk towards grave despite every other instinct telling him to run, that he didn’t want to look inside the coffin to see whatever state the body was in. But he was compelled towards it with morbid curiosity. He wanted to see if Sylvia had put up a fight. 

Sam looked down into the grave only to watch as Dean cleared away dirt so that he could lever his shovel between the lid and the base to open her casket. It didn’t open easy, Dean had to exert a lot of pressure to get it to crack open. 

And then crack open it did. The solid wood, now dampened by 25 years in the ground, splintered at the edges. Dean leaned back for a moment and let out a low whistle.

“This baby’s been sealed up tight.” He wiped a hand over his brow and looked up at his younger brother, “You wanna grab me some lighter fuel?”

Sam smiled weakly and shook his head in a fond way at Dean’s blatant attempt at shielding him from seeing inside. He walked away to retrieve the can of lighter fluid from Dean’s duffle, all the while listening to the sound of his brother quickly opening coffin’s lid and coughing harshly at the smell it had set free.

“Just throw it over Sam,” He called between coughs, “You can pack up, I’ll burn the bones.”

But Sam ignored him, walked back over to the grave, and was about to kneel down to hand Dean the lighter fluid when he froze upon viewing the sight below him.

It wasn’t the body that disturbed him. Sylvia was mostly dust and bones now, her appearance and demeanour a mystery to him. 

No, it was the state of the coffin that really divulged the horror that she’d been through. 

The satin lining along the lid had been torn the shreds, revealing thin fingernail-sized scratches on the wood beneath. Padding from the sides of the casket had been pulled out and clawed at in desperation. It was as though a wild animal had attempted tear itself free until finally succumbing to death. Sam’s eyes darted around in horror before finally settling on Sylvia’s skull and her jaw that was hanging open, stuck in an eternal scream. 

The world shifted and he was sent spiralling downwards…

“Sammy!” Came Dean’s voice from what felt like the end of a very long tunnel.

  


His eyes fluttered open to look up at the worried face of his brother staring down at him.

“You okay? Dammit Sammy, you nearly fell head first into the freakin’ grave!” Dean exclaimed as he took the hand Sam held out and helped to lever him upright again.

“Yeah, I’m fine Dean.” Sam unsuccessfully attempted to reassure him and almost laughed at how wrong those words really were.

“You might want to try that again. Because reminiscing about my short-lived burial and then fainting on the sight of ol’ Sylvia here isn’t what I’d call fine.” Dean was aiming at humour but the look in his eye betrayed the worry that lay beneath. 

Despite it all, Sam let out a small chuckle. “For normal people that would be a pretty good explanation.”

“Yeah well, we’re not normal are we?” Grinned Dean before his face fell a little, “Sam I got _out._ It’s time to stop beating yourself up about it alright?”

Sam studied his brothers face for a second and thought about what a horrifying sight Dean’s rotted corpse slowly decaying in the ground would have been. He looked away quickly, flinching at the image that was far too easy to conjure. 

He’d wanted to be the one to save Dean from that pine box with all of his being, but a part of him was incredibly relieved that he hadn’t had to exhume his brother’s body. And if that made him a coward he was fine being a coward, because at the very least, he’d been spared that.

Dean’s hand was on his shoulder again, radiating strength and forgiveness.

They sat for a few moments before Sam began to stand and his brother’s hand shifted to help him up.

The two men walked towards the grave together and stopped directly in front of the hole Dean had dug.

  


The older man doused the coffin and bones with the lighter fuel that had slipped from his younger brother’s hand before he had almost fell into the pit himself.

When he was done, Sam reached into his pocket for his Zippo lighter.

“I’m sorry.” He whispered as he dropped it into the grave.

  


The body caught fire immediately with the same familiar blanketing _whumf_ sound that he’d heard so often in his life.

Unlike his thirteen year old self, Sam didn’t watch the flames or allow the smoke to burn his throat and sting his eyes. Instead he walked away and made his way back towards the Impala with the sound of his dead father’s words echoing in his head.

  


_“….he’s here to learn.”_

  


**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! The title of this work comes from the Hozier song, In a week.
> 
> If you enjoyed this fic please check out my others! Around 70% of them are pre-series stories and all Gen :)


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